Art books: New publications list a personal top 100, the history of all art and sucking up to Lucian Freud

As London gears up for another instalment of Frieze, and the current state of visual arts is once again spotlit, historian and art critic Kelly Grovier has bravely proffered his list of 100 Works Of Art That Will Define Our Age (Thames & Hudson).

Not everything Grovier picks meets with his approval – he’s dismissive of the Chapman brothers’ Hell and Sarah Lucas’s Au Naturel – but he makes a case for each inclusion, often citing the broader narratives of the times that a piece chimed with. Grovier reaches across genres and continents, though this still feels like a British-based survey.

Anthropologist, broadcaster, author and painter Desmond Morris tries something even more ambitious in The Artistic Ape (Red Lemon Press) – a trawl through 3million years of human artistic endeavour, no less.

Morris is keen to analyse what drives humans to create art and how we can define it: chapters on non-human art (lots about his experiments with Congo the chimp), child, prehistoric and tribal art set up his basic arguments – that art is making the extraordinary out of the ordinary and we’re hard-wired to create it because of our restless intelligence and need for display.

But his whistle-stop tours through ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ art, while possibly useful as elementary primers, feel alarmingly sketchy overviews on which to build an argument of any kind.

Both Grovier and Morris pick out the work of Lucian Freud – one of the great British painters of our times. Mail On Sunday editor Geordie Greig’s Breakfast With Lucian (Jonathan Cape) is a portrait of the artist gleaned mainly from salon-style breakfast meetings in the decade up to his death.

Freud was obsessively private but Greig appears to have launched a cold-eyed campaign to win his trust and has persuaded various sitters/lovers to add recollections.

A rather sloppily written book, it manages to be both fawning and awkwardly salacious – the former Tatler editor is starry-eyed about the posh circles Freud moved in (and the dozens of high-class sexual liaisons enacted therein) but also keen to highlight examples of the artist’s self-obsessed, mean-spirited behaviour.

It feels like a stretched, gossipy magazine feature – and what’s absent is any serious consideration of Freud’s art.